Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the move of the Government from a developer-led to a plan-led approach. That was a positive move to make. My preference would be for much more State involvement in these projects, but it was a positive step to take. Having said that, in line with my colleagues’ points, we need to make sure the planning process will be well resourced and that appropriate and sufficient expertise will be there to enable not just an efficient but also a thorough examination of these projects.

When I talk about expertise, it is not just engineers. It is also ecologists and specialisations such as that. What I want to talk about today, as it is biodiversity week and I do not like talking about climate action without talking about biodiversity because they are so intertwined, is the biodiversity aspects of this. When we are looking at wind farms, similar to those on land, we need to make sure that our wind farms are in the right places. They are very important pieces of infrastructure but they need to be in the right places which is why I prefer the plan-led approach. I offer caution due to the fact that we do not have our marine protected areas, MPAs, in place yet and those two processes need to be in parallel. We cannot have one process travelling ahead of the other because that will bring with it inherent risks. I ask for speedy finalisation of the MPAs to protect biodiversity but also to provide the clarity that wind farms will need and to ensure any projects that get approval are robust and do not end up in the courts for years on end. The plan-led approach should lead to this but it is also really important that we are not looking at wind farms in isolation but rather we are looking at the cumulative impact of these wind farms on environmental considerations and biodiversity.

I use my time today to talk about the opportunities. By having this infrastructure in place, not only should we be seeking that the developers mitigate any potential biodiversity impacts of these structures, but we should be looking for an enhancement of biodiversity from these structures. The whole concept of net gain needs to be incorporated into the Minister's consideration of this. I was concerned when I looked at the policy statement that out of 29 or 30 pages, only two pages mentioned the word "biodiversity" and I think the word was only used three times in the whole document. I would like a rebalancing of that focus. There are many things developers are not only interested in doing but which the Government needs to lead and direct them in doing. When developers are developing and putting the infrastructure in, there has to be a requirement that the infrastructure is nature-sensitive. It has to a fundamental that if developers are putting infrastructure into our marine, it needs to be designed with a positive biodiversity impact arising from it. One of the considerations should be that developers have to show demonstrable efforts to design and built wind farms in a way that not only mitigates the effects but actively enhances the ecosystem.

I will use the last minute to talk about a project in Wicklow of which I have been aware and whose representatives I have met a number of times, that ism the Native Oyster Reef Restoration Ireland, NORRI, project. As the Minister will be aware, we had huge native oyster beds off the Wicklow coast. They were so positive from a biodiversity perspective but also from an economic perspective. Unfortunately, we did what humans tend to do; we overfished them and they have been wiped out. However, there are opportunities to restore those native oyster beds. Steven Kavanagh in Arklow is really keen and he has worked for many years to try to get this project off the ground. He has been in contact with the wind farms and is hopeful that they will partner and get involved in this project. It is a really positive thing that could be done and I would really like the Government to take more of an active role and to try to push this project forward. Other countries are doing these projects all the time. There is no need for us to reinvent the wheel here. We need to look overseas, see where it has worked, learn from their lessons and mistakes and incorporate it into developments here. Not only then do we get a really positive climate action and emissions result from it, we also get a very positive biodiversity result as well.

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